Eh, not quite. I’d say a better analogy involves the posts being “I have a (insert car model here) and the brakes are making worrying squealing noises”, and “Hi, here’s a (link) to a trade-in offer for a model of car that’s much less likely to have the brakes fail on you. It won’t even cost you anything to swap except 30 minutes of your time.”
The problem is, there’s no immediately visible option to stop this crap; stopping said crap therefore takes time, which is an individual person’s single most valuable resource. People have to go searching through settings or go googling ‘how do I do this’ in order to disable this, and even that slight inconvenience means there’s going to be a lot of people that want to disable it, but end up not bothering, and that’s not a good thing. Rule of thumb, if it’s not absolutely trivial to do on a whim, it may as well be impossible.
Heh. Heh heh. You think that you can… file a complaint, and get a fine dismissed just like that. Heh heh heh. God, you’re naive. Or stupid. Or a paid propagandist. Or just plain rich enough for your reaction to a fine to be ‘meh’.
Criminality is predicated on convenience. If it’s easy for an authority to throw out fines and hard for the populace to dismiss those fines, guess what’s going to happen? There’s going to be fines applied that shouldn’t have been, but that the people who are getting fined literally can’t put in the effort to get dismissed. And that’s not justice in the slightest. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’, you troll. Heard that phrase before??
Allow me to rephrase that. If an authority figure wants to prosecute you for whatever reason, even if you’ve been perfectly “legal”, they will make up a crime you committed based on something they didn’t like about you. This driving-camera crap just gives them more opportunities.
I got ticketed not too long ago because a police officer thought I was texting when I wasn’t doing anything other than looking at Google Maps. You don’t have to have committed a crime. You just have to have yourself recorded in a way that looks like you might have committed a crime. There is a VERY BIG DIFFERENCE between those qualifiers, and it is ripe for abuse. Innocence doesn’t prove innocence, and proving innocence is what matters.
How does one find those few people? And how can they be worked against? I honestly don’t know and I don’t know how to find out. Do I ask ChatGPT???
Shit, maybe I should ask ChatGPT…
For me, a shutdown is when I stop cataloging the complex bits of what I’m perceiving and just go ‘listening to this is now unpleasant and I don’t want to subject myself to any more of this’. I might smile mechanically or emit encouraging ‘hmm’ noises, but I am on autopilot, you’re not going to be getting my higher brain functions applied to whatever you’re talking about, if I remember what you said it’s going to be as factual ‘this person said such and such’ memories that I have to actively recall instead of actual opinions on what you said that will already be integrated into our next conversation, and I will dither on the far end of human interaction range trying to figure out if I can flee ‘right now’ without being impolite.
A meltdown… I get those, but I am experienced at calming myself down, so they’re basically ‘flashes’. Every so often, I will have a flash of… absolute, raging frustration at something. Like (as an example that actually happened to me recently) failing to pick up my water bottle twice after dropping it by accident. The first fumbling was an accident, they happen, they’re natural, I’m totally fine with that, I don’t even give it thought, I just go to pick it back up on reflex. The second fumble/first failure, I’m like, oops, better actually give this attention, I’ll be more careful the third time. Third fumble/second failure, my reaction is “REEEE I CAN’T PICK THIS THING UP! WHAT I JUST DID SHOULD HAVE PICKED IT UP! THIS SHOULD NOT BE!!!” (In internal monologue, not audible screaming. If it’s audible, they’re closer to the severe end of the spectrum.) And then I have to take in a deep breath through my nose and let it out slowly (and yes, I have surprised myself by actually making the ‘reeee’ sound effect while doing this) so that I can be PRECISE and DELIBERATE about picking the water bottle back up. This will then be followed by a temporary shutdown because I have just blown a fuse on my emotional centers.
The common point is, I feel, that they’re both reactions to something anathema, sort of. A shutdown is passive avoidance, a meltdown is active rejection.